Close Read: Fredo in Kabul

There is a suggestion, in Elizabeth Rubin’s profile of Hamid Karzai for the Sunday Times Magazine, that Karzai may be losing his mind. “You can’t imagine how much I’ve tolerated,” Karzai, who is up for reëlection in two weeks, tells her.

“I was like a person carrying a very delicate jar, a vase, in my hands, a very precious, delicate one that is so valuable that you don’t want it to drop, and you are walking through storms, through rains, through wind, through excesses of all kinds….You fall but you keep the vase, delicately holding it so it doesn’t break. That’s how Afghanistan was,” he said. “Carrying it for so long you have to be very accommodating. That weakens you.”

What accommodations? The warlords? The foreigners?

“Everything,” he said. “Everything, everything, everything!”

Recently, he became convinced that the British were plotting against him:

The allegations were so far-fetched that the entire diplomatic community began to think Karzai had gone mad.

“Paranoid people usually do, of course, have enemies,” Rubin writes. Worse, they collect dodgy allies. Karzai is desperately unpopular, but, with the backing of notorious warlords like General Dostum and Muhammad Fahim, he is likely to win. (See Jon Lee Anderson’s Profile of Karzai for The New Yorker for more on those connections.) Drug traffickers are campaigning for him. Rubin spoke to a man who said he was selling forged voter-registration cards for twenty dollars; he had made eight thousand of them.

And then there are Karzai’s brothers. He was one of seven, and not, Rubin writes, one of his father’s favorites. (“ ‘The mad one,’ that’s how his father called him. The pet name stuck. A quiet boy, a dreamer, an odd one.”) Afghans have to deal with Mahmoud, a “hotblooded business mogul” who has grown mysteriously wealthy, and Ahmed Wali, who is alleged to be involved in the drug trade. (There’s also Qayum, restaurateur-turned-political guru.) Karzai compared Mahmoud to a normal American businessman, adding, “What can I do?” And he said that he’d called some American officials after reading a report about Ahmed Wali’s alleged drug dealing, and that they had reassured him. Rubin continues:

A Western intelligence official who has spent much of the last seven years in Kandahar and, for obvious reasons, wanted to remain anonymous, told me: “The Karzai family has opium and blood on their hands. They systematically install low-level officials up to provincial governors to make sure that, from the farm gate, in bulk, the opium is moved unfettered. When history analyzes this period and looks at this family, it will uncover a litany of extensive corruption that was tolerated because the West tolerated this family.”

Some people Rubin spoke to said the Karzais might come to have a more respectable legacy, like reformed American robber barons or “families who made their fortunes during Prohibition.”

“Karzai should see this as ‘Godfather II,’ ” a U.N. official says. “You got to get out of the business and go legit.”

Does that mean that we’re all going to have to sit through “Godfather III” next? That was awful the first time. (Not to mention that Karzai seems more Fredo than Michael.) And what role are American troops in Afghanistan supposed to play? Forty-three Americans died there in July, the highest monthly toll yet.

Speaking of bandits, Ronnie Briggs, Britain’s Great Train Robber, who spent years on the lam in Rio, has been released from prison. He won’t get far: he is in the hospital with pneumonia and not expected to recover. Still, he’s a free man. “There is a God and maybe he is Anglo-Brazilian,” his son said.

It is not likely that God is a Pirates fan, or, if he is, PNC Park serves as a sort of purgatory: if you are a good player, you leave. The Pirates call their odd practice of trading anybody who’s half decent “rebuilding”—but, as SI.com points out, they’ve now been rebuilding for seventeen years, which puts it about on a par with reconstruction projects in Afghanistan, with a similar level of success.

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